A view on the population issue from the excellent new newsletter Counterpunch (tagline Power & Evil in Washington), edited by Ken Silverstein (founder) and Alexander Cockburn (newcomer): <quote> As the nations of the world muster in Cairo for the U.N. conference on population and development, nothing would seem more demure than the posture of the Clinton administration. As U.S. governments for the past thirty years have all done, it broadcasts its abhorrence for "coercive measures" and comfortably adopts feminist language about the right of women to control their own bodies. [...] The best and the brightest have always been the most assiduous advocates of population control. The gung-ho, can-do spirit of these fanatics was embodied by Reimert Ravenholt, a director of AID's population program: "like a spring torrent after a long, cold winter, the United States has moved with crescendo strength during recent years to provide assistance for population and family planning throughout the developing world," he wrote in 1973. In a 1977 interview -- in which he said that his agency's goal was to sterilize one-quarter of the world's women -- Ravenhold warned that a population explosion, by supposedly causing a fall in living standards in the South, could spark revolt "against the strong U.S. commercial presence" in the Third World. The policy bedrock underlying Ravenholt's exuberance was National Security Study Memorandum 200, commissioned and prepared in 1974 when Henry Kissinger was head of the NSC. In a prefiguring of the present "empowerment" shoe polish, planners stressed that t the U.S. should "help minimize charges of imperialist motivation behind its support of population activities by repeatedly asserting that such support derives from a concern with the right of the individual to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing of children." The true concern of the study's authors was maintaining access to Third World resources (the document was prepared during the height of the "commodity crisis"). NSSM-200 worried that the "political consequences" of population growth could produce internal instability in nations "in whose advancement the U.S. is interested." In extreme cases, where population pressures "lead to endemic famine, food riots, and the breakdown of the social order...the smooth flow of needed materials will be jeopardized. NSSM-200 acknowledged that First World resource use, not developing world growth rates, was the real issue. Its authors noted laconically that "the US, with 6% of the world's population, consumes about a third of its resources." To restrict Third World population would ensure that local consumption would not increase, and possibly affect the availability of Third World resources. As a natural extension of that logic, the report favored sterilization over food aid. [...] In a 1990 Lancet, the British medical journal, Dr Maurice King of the University of Leeds wrote that the options of citizens of "demographically trapped" countries are mass death from starvation and disease, large-scale migration, or permanent dependence e on food and other resources from abroad. King suggested it might be best to let poor children in these countries die. "If no adequately sustaining complementary measures are possible, such desustaining measures as oral rehydration should not be introduced ed on a public health scale, since they increase the man-years of human misery, ultimately from starvation," wrote King. Kill them to be kind. <endquote> [For info on CounterPunch, write to CounterPunch, c/o Institute for Policy Studies, 1601 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC 20009, or call 202-234-9382.] Doug Doug Henwood [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Left Business Observer 212-874-4020 (voice) 212-874-3137 (fax)
